More Like Her
by Morwen Maranwe
Summary: Based on the song 'More Like Her' by Miranda Lambert. How does Nessie react to hearing about Bella and Jacob's past for the first time?


Don't kill me, I have an affinity for songfics, just because I love music so much. I try not to write the stories as songfics, but I do like to use the lyrics of the songs that inspire my writing and ideas in the story. This one turned out neater than I thought because of the interaction with Nessie and Edward at the end. I think their relationship is adorable and complex and I love writing or reading about it.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything Twilight related, but I've got my lawyers working on it! And I don't own the song, either.

"_She's beautiful in her simple little way_

_She don't have too much to say when she gets mad._

_She understands, she don't let go of anything_

_Even when the pain gets really bad._

_I guess I should have been more like that._

_I should have held on to my pride,_

_I should have never let you lie,_

_I guess you got what you deserve,_

_I guess I should have been more like her._

_Forgiving you, she's stronger than I am_

_You don't look much like a man from where I'm at._

_Its plain to see, desperation showed its truth_

_You love her as she loves you with all she has._

_I guess I should have been more like that."_

-More Like her, Miranda Lambert

Renesmee sat on the dirt in the middle of the forest, staring up at the moon and trying to ignore the distant howling coming from across town. She knew what it was, but she was not ready to deal with it. She gouged a hole in the moist ground with a stick and dug it in, finding a sick sort of satisfaction in how easily the pointed end of the twig penetrated the dirt, and how deep she was able to shove it in.

In one part of her mind the stick was a knife and the ground was Jacob Black's leg, and she relished the pain she would have caused him. But in another part of her mind—the part she was trying to block off—the ground was her heart, and it was Jacob's hand that wrapped around the thin twig and jabbed, pushing the end deeper and deeper until she felt that she couldn't breathe from the pain of it.

That was the part of her imagination that won over.

She tried to think of anything at all that would not bring her mind back around to Jake. But, unfortunately, all of her memories were tainted with him, and she couldn't even think about her family without him popping up somehow in her memories of them, because he had always been there. Always.

Even before she was born.

She let out a frustrated growl. How could things have gotten so messed up? Yesterday, she and Jacob were happy, holding hands and stealing kisses. And now today…

She felt like she never wanted to see him again. And there really was no one he could blame but himself.

She had been disgusted when he had told her that he had once been in love with her mother. Mortified. How was such a thing even possible?

She remembered him sitting her down at the table in her family's cottage earlier that day, her mother and father slipping silently out the door, leaving the two of them able to talk freely. Jacob had said that there was something she needed to know, if they were going to spend the rest of their lives together.

Out of all of the things she had expected him to tell her, that was the very last thing on her mind. Actually, it hadn't been on her mind at all. Because it was unfathomable.

At her mature age now, her body had stopped growing, but her mind did not. It grew and expanded every day that she was alive, and even if she had been younger she would have known what the implications of his words were. There was no hiding the meaning and everything that was involved in that sentence.

_"I was in love with your mother."_

The bastard!

He had always told her, even when she was child, that he had never loved anyone else the way he loved her. She was special to him.

She had believed him then.

She did not believe him now.

The conversation rang in her mind, the memory so vibrant it was like she was watching a movie of it in her head, and she wished like crazy she could turn it off.

"_How much did you love her, Jake?" she had asked, because she needed to know the truth. And she knew that he would tell her the truth, no matter how much it killed him._

"_I was ready to kill to be with her. And I was ready to die if I wasn't able to be."_

Her mother. Bella. The woman who risked her life to bring her into this world. The woman who risked everything she loved to _keep_ her in this world.

Thoughts about her mother rose unbidden in her mind. The soft smile, the beautiful golden eyes that lit up whenever she looked upon her daughter's face, the long, thick hair that tumbled down around Renesmee when she laid her head against her mother's chest as a child.

Jacob had kissed those lips. He had looked deep into those eyes, when they were still brown like her own, the way that he looked deeply into hers. He had rested his head against the top of Bella's and breathed in her scent, running his fingers through her hair.

The anger swam in front of her vision and blurred it. She couldn't even think straight she was so mad. She felt the twig snap in her hand.

To her horror, Renesmee found that she was also mad at her mother. Jealous. She found herself sizing Bella up in a way she never thought she would. Comparing herself to her beautiful mother and friend.

And she hated Jacob for it.

She was mad at her mother because she had loved him back. She had loved him when she was supposed to have loved only her father; she had loved him when she should have known that Jacob had been destined for her daughter.

And she was mad because, although Jacob had made her mother's life as much of a nightmare as he was making her own, Bella had never given up on him, never walked away from him so completely, never turned her back to him the way Renesmee had and refused to let him talk to her, to explain himself.

That was the difference between her mother and herself. Bella never burned bridges; Bella never intentionally hurt anyone's feelings. Renesmee had. She reveled in the pain that she brought to Jacob when she walked away from him. Even now, she enjoyed the lonely sound of his howls calling out to her.

She thought it only fair that he hurt as much as she was hurting right now.

But Bella was different. She didn't do that. She tried her hardest to placate everyone, her husband, her best friend, her family. There was always a middle ground with Bella.

There was not with her father.

And there was not with Renesmee.

The jealousy rose like bile in her throat. Her mother was such a wonderful person, so compassionate. How could Renesmee ever compete with her? How could Jacob want to be with only a cheap imitation of Bella? Was that why he loved her in the first place? Because he couldn't have the original? So he would just have to settle for the carbon copy?

There was the rustle of leaves off to her right, and Renesmee stiffened. She was not scared of animals in the forest, only of the man she did not want to see right now—she didn't know what she would do or say to him, and she wished, not for the first time that day, that she had Bella's tact, instead of her father's temper.

But instead Edward stepped out of the shadows of the trees. He was alone, and she had never been happier to see one of her parent's without the other.

"Can I sit with you?" His voice was light and conversational, as if he couldn't hear the horrible thoughts rolling around in her head.

She didn't say anything, only shrugged. He sat next to her on the ground, pulling his long legs underneath him. He reached an arm out and wrapped it around her. His skin was cold and hard, but it was comforting to her, a security blanket she remembered from her childhood.

"You knew about all this, right? You knew about them?" Her voice was a whisper. She didn't even really need to say the words out loud, but she wanted them to be real to her, wanted to hear them with her own ears.

"I knew." He did not look at her, but instead stared past her, his eyebrows pulling into a knot in the middle of his forehead as he frowned at some distant memory, and she wished not for the first time that he had her gift, so that she could see what he was seeing.

"It was very complicated, Nessie. There is so much that we haven't told you from that time. I wish…." He trailed off, and she let him, because that was always their excuse. It was 'complicated'. She was not a child and she knew that he knew it, but she also knew that sometimes Edward couldn't help but see her as the tiny, frail baby he had pulled from his wife's belly.

"How can you stand it?" she asked, her voice breaking slightly in a way that embarrassed her. Her father pulled his arm tighter around her.

"I can stand it because she is not with him. She is with me. Just the way that you will be able to stand it because he is not with her, he is with you." He moved away from her then, so that he could look at her, and she was surprised to find a sadness in his face that she had never seen before. "You should know, Nessie, that they love each other in a way that is special to them. Even now they feel that way about each other. But it's a love that is different from what your mother feels for me, or what Jacob feels for you. When I left your mother," his voice grew tight as he spoke, and Renesmee knew better than to interrupt him. She didn't even breathe—he never spoke of his time away from her mother, as though it physically hurt him to remember it. "There was a hole in her that she thought nothing and no one could fill. Jacob filled that hole. And I hate myself everyday of my life for leaving her, because if I hadn't, then she would never have fallen in love with him, and she wouldn't have had to feel the pain of having to choose between us, and you wouldn't be feeling the pain of hearing that they had once loved each other."

She leaned back into him because she couldn't stand to look at the sadness in his face, and she wanted him to know that she didn't blame him. "Does he wish I was her? Does he miss the life he wanted with her?"

Edward rubbed his hand up her arm comfortingly as he contemplated his answer. That was one thing she loved about her father—he never spoke without thinking about his words, and when he did they somehow ended up being exactly what she wanted to hear. "I know for a fact that he does not wish you were your mother. He would give up a million lives with her for even half of one with you. He loves you in a way that he never loved her, Nessie, and in that you have something of his that she never did, something that is wholly yours."

She sat wrapped in her father's arms for a long minute. In the distance there was another piercing howl that hurt her heart and made her wince. When she spoke next her words were unsure and she sounded like a child again. "Daddy, should I marry him?"

He pulled her head close to his and kissed her on her forehead, a move he reserved only for her mother and her—his girls, the two loves of his life. "He will love you like no other person can, Nessie," he told her flatly. She wondered at the way he was able to speak to her about this; Edward had never hidden his dislike of Jacob. Renesmee had thought it was because her father had felt the way all fathers did about their daughter's boyfriends. But now she understood that the dislike ran deeper than she had ever fathomed, seeping into a river of turmoil and angst that everyone had deemed 'too complicated' for her to ever understand. "The only thing you need to ask yourself, Nessie, is if _you_ love him enough to marry him."

She leaned her head on her father's shoulder. "Would you still love me if I said that I do?"

Beneath her head, Edward's shoulders shook with laughter. She looked up at him out of the corner of her eye and saw his teeth glinting in the darkness, his perfectly smooth face—that looked so much like her own—glowing in the moonlight. "Yes, baby, I would still love you." He became serious again. "And so would your mother."

Renesmee sighed. Would things ever be easy for them?

"No, probably not," her father answered. "You're just going to have to get used to the fact that we are not even close to being a normal family. In any way."

A smile tugged at Renesmee's lips. Now that was an understatement. Just when she got used to how strange and different her family was, even from other vampires, something else happened to make things even more difficult to live with.

"They could make a Greek tragedy out of us," Edward agreed, and Renesmee giggled.

_I love you, Daddy_, she thought, and she reached up to touch her palm to his cheek. A single thought flashed across her mind, her first memory of life—Edward looking down at her in wonder, holding her lightly in his hands as if he was afraid to even wrap his fingers around her tiny body. His clothes, face and hands were covered in blood, but for once he didn't even register the smell. He only had eyes for the beautiful creature he had just pulled out of his wife. Their daughter.

He gave her a memory in return, sending it back through the connection she still kept with her hand on his face. It was of him handing her to Bella when she asked for her baby. Nessie remembered that first time she saw her mother, but it was different to look at it from someone else's point of view. In Edward's memory, everything was tinted with the love he shared for both of them, and she could see her own face, a baby, gazing up at her mother with wonder and adoration. Bella face was pure joy in that moment, and as she gazed back up at Edward, Renesmee saw the look that the two had shared.

Edward turned his head to break their connection and planted a small kiss on Renesmee's palm. "You don't have to be like anyone, Nessie. You don't have to have to remind Charlie of Bella and you don't have to have my temper. You are your own person, so special that I wonder how on Earth we were lucky enough to have you sent to us. Or you can be a combination of the two of us. You can have your mother's eyes and my hair. You can be whoever you want to be, and he will still love you for you."

They both heard the howl in the distance.

"Just go easy on him the next time you see him, Ness," Edward said, laughing lightly again. "You don't want to do something that you'll regret."


End file.
